Tag archives: stuff

This website has now been updated so it cares about your privacy. Surprisingly, I am a rather private person (even though I blast my things all over the internet) and I think this is A Good Thing. GDPR compliance is a good thing. For you.

You should read our Privacy Policy. It explains everything the best it can.

Uses This

Uses This is a website where they interview people about the systems, tools and apps a variety of people use to get their work done. It’s a fascinating insight into how people use things to create things. I thought it might be interesting to do my own and see how that turns out.

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hello, I’m Duncan and I’m a designer. I went through a whole phase of being undecided of what I actually wanted to call myself because I do a whole bunch of vaguely related creative stuff and finally decided on just saying ‘designer’ and leaving it at that.

Some of the time I design things for laser machines to cut as part of the Bristol Design Forge, which is great fun. A lot of the rest of the time I can be found creating weird projects and trying to sell bits of them (unsuccessfully); working on designing small, beautiful games over at Sparkwood and 21; writing weird, bleepy, crappy music as Skinny Feels; and barking at strangers in the park.

What hardware do you use?

I have an early 2015 Retina 13″ MacBook Pro which is my main tool for being creative. It’s maxed out on its RAMs and SSDs so it should last me a while. It’s got an amazing little MIDI keyboard that attaches to it that helps me make musical noises when I can’t sleep and one of them adaptors that turns a string plucked on a guitar into a digital signal ready to be picked up by GarageBand.

I’ve also got a huge old beast of a hand-built PC with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD and one 256GB SSD for the OS. This is attached to a magnificent Philips soundbar and an equally magnificent Philips 42″ monitor. And a fat pipe direct to the Internet.

Then there’s the backup machine: an old Thinkpad Edge which is about 12 years old and still holds it own when it comes to daily tasks.

I can’t live without my iPhone 7Plus with its 256GB SSD or my Kindle Fire. Somewhere there’s an old iPad One with a whole bunch of manuals stuck on it as all it can do is read PDFs. Plus, I have a Nokia Windows phone that I use as the number I give out for work and switches off at 1800hrs until 1000hrs the next day. No voicemail. Voicemail is bad.

Having said all of that, my most productive thing I own is an A5 handmade leather journal that I made myself. I designed a whole joad of journal pages, dotted notepaper and lists and stuff. Pretty much everything starts as a scribble in this notebook.

Top that with a bunch of guitars by Tanglewood, Fender and Gibson and a Trace Elliot Amplifier, a MIDI Keyboard whose name escapes me, two Trotec Lasercutters and a fully working wood working workshop and I reckon that’s about it.

My Thinkpad has elementaryOS and a whole bunch of open source tools for gamedev including Blender, Krita and Godot. All these are excellent products and I’m continually surprised that I don’t have to pay for them. Go Open Source!

The big PC beast has Steam, Twitch and Discord on it. And is synced with SheepIt render farm so I can quickly render Blender scenes / models when I’m not trying to blow things up, shoot things or drive things around cities really fast.

What would be your dream setup?

A online and an offline business set up in a warm studio / workshop full of up-to-date devices, standing desks, relaxing tables, the smell of coffee, leather and sawdust. And Radio 4. Plus a couple of good friends to share my life with.

If you want to see what other people use to get the job done, then go check out the Uses This website and get lost down a hole for hours.

I’ve finally decided that I need a place on the internet that I have full control of and that showcases the things I get up to.

At the moment, all my projects and art and thoughts and ideas are spread out over a variety of social medias(1) which I have very little control over. So having a place which collates it all and where I can point people to when they ask the what do you do then? question will be of use to me.

But mostly, this is going to be a place where I can start to build my empire from. You see, I have this Five Year Plan which involves moving to a nearby city and getting a dog(2) and running a home-based business. I have all of the skills I need, I just need the time to create and build and develop and grow(3) and this site is going to help me do that.

I’d love it if this was something you could get behind. The act of making myself more public is a way for me to be responsible with my time and effort and use the visitors that stumble upon this site as a way of helping me get on with getting on. I just don’t want to let you down.